With this upcoming fiscal year, President Obama has budgeted for our government to increase spending to a stupefying amount: $3.4 trillion. His proposed cuts are $17 billion — half of Bush’s last proposal which was subsequently blocked by Congress. This is the most in the history of the world — and it is $1.2 trillion more than the government is planning on bringing in. You do not need to be an economist in order to comprehend that the recent policies of the United States will lead to a financial dilemma — we are modern Rome.

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, was the last to leave office without a national debt. That was in 1837. The national bank of the United States has been printing trillions of dollars in order to finance our bailouts. When asked by Rep. Alan Grayson where that money vanished and who received the funds, the inspector general for the Federal Reserve could not give an account as to where the money has gone. We have been off the gold standard since 1973, and until recently maintained a quasi-responsible management policy of spending. We have increased the printing of money rapidly, and inflation is bound to strike within a year. Our government couldn’t sell T-bonds last week in order to finance ourselves; China can no longer purchase our debt. Empires fail from economic breakdown, not foreign attacks. Et tu, America?